Once again, physicians are at the top of the heap when it comes to top-paying jobs.
Physicians lead the list of the 25 highest-paying jobs with a median base salary of $187,876, but other medical professions also paid well, according to a report by Glassdoor, an online job recruiting website. Six jobs on the list were from the healthcare sector (up from three in 2016), including nurse practitioners, who made the cut for the first time.
In the third annual list released by the company, physicians were in the top spot and healthcare jobs showed up in four of the top five spots. Both the salary and the number of job openings (7,700 positions) increased for doctors on the 2017 list from the previous year. The median base salary in the 2016 survey was $180,000 and the recruiting site listed more than 2,000 job openings for doctors.
Nearly half of the top 25 highest-paid jobs were made up of positions in the tech and healthcare industries, a fact that “reinforces that higher salaries are found in America's fastest job-creating sectors, which require higher education and in-demand skill sets,” said Andrew Chamberlain, Ph.D., Glassdoor’s chief economist, in an announcement.
But while pay is one of the leading factors job seekers consider when looking for a new position, the money isn’t necessarily tied to long-term job satisfaction, he added. Dissatisfaction with the job is high among doctors. Some 900,000 practicing physicians, along with millions of other healthcare workers, are caught in a complicated healthcare web that leads to an epidemic of burnout in the medical field.
Besides physicians, the following are the other top paying healthcare jobs on the list, including their rank and median base salary:
2. Pharmacy manager, $149,064
4. Medical science liaison, $132,842
5. Pharmacist, $125,847
7. Physician assistant, $112,529
14. Nurse practitioner, $104,144
Physician assistants and nurse practitioners are the most in-demand jobs, with 13,547 and 12,566 current job openings respectively.
There’s also a wide variance in physician salaries depending on what state they practice in, according to a 24/7 Wall Street study. Physicians practicing in Alaska, Iowa and Kansas have the highest salaries in the U.S. on average. Doctors in Alaska earn the most with an average salary of $235,600, while in contrast, physicians in Oklahoma earn $144,100 a year, the lowest of any state. The study provides a state-by-state breakdown.